Monday, October 05, 2009

I'm not sure why Windows Vista feel that, even though I've set up my updates to be manual, if I click the "remind me later" option, it decides to install them without my permission at some point while I'm not at my computer.

It seems every time it does so, something goes wonky.

Before, it's lost files that I'd left open, it's developed a glitch that wouldn't let it come out of hibernation, and last night, well, I'm not sure what the hell it did.

Initially, it wouldn't come out of hibernation. Fine. A restart fixed that usually.

I restarted.

Monitors weren't working. Not even a BIOS screen. Weird. Graphics card must have gotten loose. No idea how, but whatever. Pulled it out, reseated it. Oh good. We have visual! Let's restart.

Windows freezes when starting.

WTF?

Restart with last known configuration.

Freezes on startup.

Restart in safe mode. Everything works fine and sure enough, it apparently updated without asking me last night while I was at a play. Fine. I'll just restore back to before it went stupid.

Restore.

Freezes on startup.

Bah. Back to safe mode.

Can't load safe mode.

Restart. Safe mode works.

Restore to a month ago (when after 5 months of owning Vista, it finally recognized I had a sound card installed and found drivers for it). Restart.

Windows freezes on startup.

Dammit all. Going to have to reinstall Vista.

Grab CD and begin install.

Freezes on install on final step after an hour.

Restart and pray it was secretly finished.

Starts up.

And freezes.

Restart install.

Install completes.

Now to find drivers for everything and reinstall all my plug ins, bookmarks, codecs, programs and everything else....

While your machine is working, you can download a copy of Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download) and (legally) burn an installation CD. If you don't want to wipe a working Vista, you can either put the CD on the shelf for the next time that Vista decides that you are not worthy, test-boot Ubuntu and play with it (without touching the contents of your hard-drive) or you can even install Ubuntu in a dual-boot configuration. In that case, you can choose Vista or Ubuntu every time your machine boots. Ubuntu will automatically re-size your Vista partition and install itself "dual-boot", if you decide to install it.

I'm happy I skipped Vista, but XP can be pretty annoying too. My work laptop is configured to update automatically, and sometimes it doesn't let me cancel the restart, even if I'm in the middle of a lecture. Grrr.